Oswego County vote results sorted out after phone glitch

Oswego, NY -- Chaos was the word Oswego County Democratic Elections Commissioner William Scriber used to describe the Election Night call-in center at the Oswego County Public Safety Center in Oswego.

A phone system foul-up resulted in numerous incorrect vote numbers being recorded on the board of elections Web site Tuesday night. Also, some election inspectors from polling sites read numbers incorrectly when calling them in.

Of the 245 local races (not counting the congressional and court races), 84 had incorrect results reported of Tuesday night.

Only one race result changed because of the mistaken numbers: totals now show the winners of the Parish town board seats to be Mary Lou Guindon and John Dunham. Tuesday’s results had incumbent Dale Chapman winning re-election.

While the new results show Dunham with a 23 vote lead over Chapman for the second town board seat, there still are 51 absentee ballots from Parish to be counted.

"We knew something was wrong on the Board of Election’s Web site. They added Dale’s numbers twice," Dunham said Thursday.

The Board of Elections took results off its Web site Wednesday morning until all vote totals could be double checked in the board’s offices on East Seneca Street. The vote results released Thursday afternoon still are unofficial until affidavit and absentee ballots are reviewed and counted.

Scriber said this is the way the system was supposed to work:

A poll worker was to call a specific number Tuesday night to report results. That number was supposed to ring at a phone where a worker at the call center was waiting with tally sheets to fill in for that particular town.

A problem arose if that particular number was in use. Then, the call would switch to another phone instead of just ringing busy. Workers with sheets that didn’t correspond to the races in questions were answering phones and taking results. So numbers were being recorded incorrectly.

"The phone calls were going here and there," Scriber said.

To make corrections Wednesday, Board of Elections workers took the Web site down and rechecked the information that came from voting machines.

In Parish, an election inspector called in a total (number of votes) and a district at the same time, leading to too many votes being recorded for town board candidate Dale Chapman.

Scriber said these problems won’t exist next year as the county moves to a new system for collecting results that does not involve the telephone.